DuckDuckGo has had 0 search warrants since founding in 2008 | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo has had 0 search warrants since founding in 2008

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322 pointsarkadiyt184 comments

Usually in threads about DDG a common refrain is "but the results are worse!" - generally to mean less specific. I always thought that was the feature -- they don't compile a history on you, track your location, etc. As a result, they take a best guess from a global context.

FWIW, I've been a DDG user full time (mobile and desktop) for ~5 years. I have learned to increase the specificity of my search (e.g. start with a programming language before typing an error string). Feels like a very small price to pay to avoid Google.

In my experience, being a DDG user for several years, I use search to find answers to some problem I'm facing. If I can find it, I'm happy, without caring about if Google would have given me better results. I don't spend my time comparing between the two.

Based on the above, I'm been mostly satisfied, I'll say 99% of the time. In the 1% of cases where DDG has not provided me an answer to my problem, as a hail mary I try !g (Google) and sometime I get an answer and many times not.

So, IMO the difference in search for most practical uses is minor. Now, add the uncluttered user interface on top of it, DDG wins by a huge margin.

Edit: Anecdata, an area where I've found that Google is slightly better, as in having a few more results, is in returning results from forums and sometimes Reddit. But even then, DDG results are mostly sufficient and there are only a very few instances where I've had to do !g.

I think the idea that DDG searches are "worse" is vastly overblown. But again, I don't directly compare the two. But using DDG for many years I have searched for my query, scan the title of the top 4-5 results (which are visible w/o scrolling) and click the best one I see in the results. I have managed to find what I needed now on nearly every occasion. Going to page 2 is an incredibly rare occurrence.

The one difference I notice between Google and DDG is that DDG shows more search results "above the fold", meaning without scrolling. There are some searches on Google where not even a single legitimate/organic search result is visible without scrolling. The top of the results page is cluttered with all sorts of self-promotion, info boxes, ads, maps, and other garbage. A normal search result usually yields 0-1 (or 2 max) organic results above the fold.

So in my opinion that is the trade-off. Is that experience of clutter a better search result? I guess that is a matter of preference, but for me I prefer the simpler results from DDG. I am able to find what I want and the experience is preferable, and my privacy isn't compromised. So to me that is the winner.

The one area that I will admit Google has DDG beat is local search. It isn't even a close contest. I append !g to any search query when I am looking for a local result such as costco hours, or the name of a local restaurant to find their page or address. That is the one area where DDG just plain sucks and Google nails it every time.

> The one area that I will admit Google has DDG beat is local search. It isn't even a close contest. I append !g to any search query when I am looking for a local result such as costco hours, or the name of a local restaurant to find their page or address. That is the one area where DDG just plain sucks and Google nails it every time.

I agree 100%. Not just Costco hours, but more importantly, as part of Google Maps what are the busy hours of Costco and how busy it is currently. That histogram is fantastic. With Covid that came in very handy at avoiding rush hours..

It’s unfortunate that feature explicitly depends on the massive surveillance dragnet that Google has with location data.

yeah, Google maps is still the way to go if you are traveling and want to find a good espresso (protip: search for "roaster" rather than "espresso" if you are a snob like me). Also for code related searches. For everything else, DDG is fine.

If I turn country-aware search on and add my city to the search I get much more localized results than Google was ever able to give me. And as a bonus, I can add a different city when I want.

Do you really only !g 1% of the time? I've been trying to use DDG more, but still end up using !g maybe 10-20% of the time. I don't know if the results are actually worse on DDG. Maybe I'm just so accustomed to Google that my eyes are quicker to fix on useful links. The blue page titles definitely help.

> Do you really only !g 1% of the time?

Yes, I can confirm that for me personally. Most of the time I don't even think about doing that and I'm mostly satisfied. It's only when I hit a wall then I remember to do !g. So, overall for me it's been working well.

As I noted in my edit, one area where Google seems to have an edge is results from relevant forums and the likes. So, sometimes I have to remember to do !g when the results on topics I'm looking for are mostly discussed in some forums.

Also, I've become more accustomed to DDG that I find Google different. But, I've been using DDG for longer it seems.

Same here. I do hundreds of queries weekly, and I very very rarely reach for !g, so I would say on my case it is way less than 1%. And even there once reaching !g I may have a 50% chance of not having any improvement on results. Been happy ddl user for the last 7 years and it keeps improving.

Same here, 1% about fits. Most of the time I only use !g for when DDG once again decided to ignore what I search for, and even then, about 80% of the time the only difference is that Google actually tells me they ignored what I searched for.

You'll probably start to style your search queries in a DDG-friendly way over time. I couldn't describe what that style looks like, but it becomes something you don't even notice (in my experience)

I've been using it as my primary search for a couple years now, and in the last year or so I'd say I use !g about once a week, usually for local results.

Personally, I almost never use !g, but I use !maps (google maps) about 1-2% of the time to plan out trips, find places to eat, etc.

DDG user but want to say that Google image search is still miles better.

I can search for an image based on my memory of elements within the picture e.g. compare the results I get when searching

“nwa all looking down”

https://www.google.com/search?q=nwa+all+looking+down&hl=en&p...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nwa+all+looking+down&t=iphone&iax=...

“Film Poster men in suits Tarantino”

https://www.google.com/search?q=film+poster+men+in+suits+tar...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=film+poster+men+in+suits+tarantino...

My favorite part of the DDG image search is being able to locate and save the original image file without needing to navigate to the website.

Google included this feature until a few years ago where they removed it.

They removed it because photographers and publishers complained about how easy it was for the average person to just take images from the results and use them elsewhere without attribution. The funny thing is, all you need to do now is to right-click on the image and open in a new tab. But based on your change in behavior I guess that little bit of obfuscation was a lot more effective that I thought.

> Google included this feature until a few years ago where they removed it.

I vaguely recall something about a legal settlement. A quick search didn't turn anything up, though.

It was with Getty. http://resourcemagonline.com/2018/02/getty-and-google-reach-...

Fortunately that's not a problem of needing user specific information. I'm sure by hiring the right engineers they can start improving on some of the search algorithms in this arena.

DDG is a Bing frontend.

They don't have budget or staff for building search indexing/ranking like this.

Yandex is pretty good. But where it really got Google beat is in reverse image search.

To me using duckduckgo feels a lot like what using google used to be like. Basically it's all about picking the right keywords. This has the advantage of giving more predictable results, but has the disadvantage that it's hard to find something with vague queries (e.g. good luck finding a quote from a movie you've half forgotten).

I documented (a subset of) my experience in [1]. I don't think any of the Google victories there can be considered to be because of personalization.

[1]: https://www.arnavion.dev/blog/2020-12-05-ddg-vs-google/

Thank you for documenting it so thoroughly. My experience totally agrees with this. DDG often returns a lot of irrelevant results and they are not irrelevant because they're not personalised to me, but because they do not include terms in my query - even when those terms are in quotes! I simply cannot tell DDG: "unless that exact string is in the page I don't want to see this result"! (To be fair, I cannot tell Google that, either, but it still returns better results.)

Today's example: I searched for

> linux nic bonding "bond-mode"

The second result is https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... which does not include the string "bond-mode" (nor "bond mode").

Very informative write-up.

I use Duckduckgo as my main engine and it works well for most of what I search, but for some specific things I have to use other search engines (Google for local results and "guess what I'm thinking" results, Yandex for reverse image search and search in general). Fortunately, bangs make it easy to do it when necessary.

I gotta say, of all the searches to not let Google track one on, local seems like second after baby-related.

I find “things to do in X city” is “companies in X that paid us the most”

I like DDG, i use it as my go to. That being said, it's very very USA centric. It will default all my searches that are place related (weather, restaurants, addresses) to the USA.

Same. I only use DDG for web search and never feel the need to use Google search. I suspect the people who complain about the result quality either have very specific needs or could actually improve their query quality. I use Google's image search occasionally, because I feel it has more results.

The part that is really hard to degoogle for me is Youtube. There just is no alternative (if you factor in the available content).

I am fine using DDG except for one specific thing. I am a big sports fan and check scores for soccer and hockey all the time.

Being able to search "NHL" or "MLS" on Google brings up the days games and scores at the very top of the search. I don't get that with DDG and every time I try to switch, I always come crawling back to Google for that feature alone.

I found a self hosted whoogle[0] to be a good middle ground.

[0]: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

Been using DDG for the past 3 years without any complaints except the lacking restaurant information. Everything else is on par with or better than Google.

Startpage gives me wildly better results.

There are some searches that just aren’t going to happen in DDG.

Can you elaborate?

I don't think that argument holds very much water. You can test both in sanitized environments, and Google's search is still better. Their algorithm is so much more than "surface content based on personal data" but people are so quick to deduce it down to just that.

I want DDG to succeed, but their search product sucks, and its not because they don't collect data.

I use DDG for years, and it's at most once a month when I can't find something and need to fall back to Google. Maybe I got used to the suckiness? Or maybe it's relative?

DDG = Bing

Startpage = Google

Bing/DDG results suck (when localized to Sweden), so I use Startpage.

I know it's owned by an ad tech company now, but I haven't seen any proof that will affect me. Its reach can't be compared to Google's, which has its trackers on just about every web page (Google Analytics and Fonts).

Looks like Startpage is now what Scroogle was roughly up to a decade ago.

https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/22/scroogle-founder-pulls-the...

Any time DDG fails me, I just append "!s" to proxy the search through StartPage instead. I've found it scratches the itch pretty well for 99% of my use cases.

Which is just google, right?

In the same sense that "DuckDuckGo is just Bing".

I thought Startpage is literally a privacy layer over Google Search and DDG has their own webcrawler and algorithms built on top of Bing.

I found myself typing !s so much I switched my default to start page. DDG results are really bad imo

I use Google for work DDG for play.

Google is just so much better at finding technical related content.

What does better mean? I've never had any trouble finding exactly what I am searching for when using DDG. As long as I find what I want, does it matter if Google is "better"?

The last time that I checked, DDG was buying search results from Bing (as does Ecosia).

Is Bing that terrible?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

"It uses various APIs of other websites to show quick results to queries and for traditional links it uses the help of its partners (mainly Bing) and its own crawler."

Bing has been caught stealing results from Google too. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

It seems like every search engine that isn't google, is still just google but with extra stuff mixed in. It'd be nice to see a competitor that didn't rely on anyone else's search results and only developed and gathered results from their own index.

Apologies for self-promotion. Mojeek Independent and no-tracking https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-track.htm... Gigablast is another and one of very few https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-...

Unfortunately, from what i've learnt from HN that this is not really possible. Most websites ban crawlers\bots with the exception of those run by google and maybe bing. It seems that this market is hermetically sealed.

Bing isn't too bad. I've actually half-migrated to using it since the results are often relevant and usually even better than Google.

From my experience, Google is better at searching for programming-related topics, but anything specific and it starts to fall apart. I can make an exact phrase query on Google and it will drop words out of the phrase for no reason. Bing doesn't do this.

Wouldn't it be more impressive if they were served warrants but refused or were unable to comply? This just makes it sound like no one uses DDG so the authorities don't care to request that information.

As mentioned in the tweet, the impressive part is that "DuckDuckGo doesn't have any search histories by design and, bc of that, has had 0 search warrants"

> and, bc of that, has had 0 search warrants

That's an abductive argument, which means it is one plausible explanation, but given the many possible explanations, it is not certain that the lack of search history is why they've had 0 search warrants.

This is why nobody listens to philosophers.

Why, on any planet, would law enforcement issue a warrant to get user data from a company that doesn't have any user data?

You don't need to dive down into the fundamentals of logic and reasoning to answer this question.

To make them go check. Maybe they got lucky and the site design was flawed.

So they can say they did. The jury will wonder why the investigation didn't include the defendant's search history. Now they can say, "We asked but they didn't have it".

Because law enforcement is clueless.

Or rather, they won't even bother with these nerdy distinctions.

“You’re asking for something that doesn’t exist” isn’t a nerdy distinction.

Warrants aren’t like dollar bills the cops just pay to see things. They are issued on a case by case basis by a judge.

You mean like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29042603 ?

Sure it's not proof, but it's pretty good evidence.

This man is unlikely to be the shooter because he has no hands.

Terrible analogy. You don't need hands to shoot a gun, and the hands-less man would still be issued a warrant if there were evidence he was the shooter.

The point is that being issued warrants and claiming to not have search logs are independently conclusive.

The number of users and the number of issued warrants however are dependant...

Yeah, abduction reasoning is still useful, it can serve to orient us in our surroundings, aka, it can help us explore the search space from places that are more likely to be correct. So it's still a useful form of reasoning.

Just don't make the mistake of thinking it proves the consequent.

I'd much have preferred the tweet said:

"DuckDuckGo doesn't have any search histories by design and, this might be the reason why we've had 0 search warrants."

But it said:

"DuckDuckGo doesn't have any search histories by design and, bc of that, has had 0 search warrants"

That's a strong assertion, and it's not been demonstrated. You could likely say that it is because the police had never had a case where they needed too, given the lack of popularity of DDG, they might have found all they needed through other sources of warrants. Or it could be any other reason, like they don't even know it exists, or anything else I'm not thinking of.

Or you fundamentally misunderstand how warrants are issued and don’t realize that in order for the warrant to search something to be issued, the court (judge) first confirms that it’s something that actually can be searched.

I cannot believe that no prosecutor got a warrant just to see if they were telling the truth in their PR materials...

As if that assurance by DDG would've stopped the authorities from requesting something.

tbf, DDG can't know that they have no requests because they don't collect history, although that wouldn't be a completely mad assumption. It is also conceivable that their market share is simply so small that no-one the police are chasing are known to use DDG for their web searches.

In fact the second is more likely since otherwise the Tweet would read, "we haven't been able to serve any warrant requests", rather than "we haven't received any"

Or, you know, the tweet may be a lie.

Right... The one privacy-based search engine included in browser search engine lists. If the government wanted to make a secret deal with a company, it's not like they would make it known. Heck, they could even get cases redacted that mention it. People gotta make money.

My cynical suspicion is that they probably aren't getting warrants because as a US based online service that is specifically marketed to people interested in privacy they've already been handed a national security letter that prevents them from telling anyone about it and the state is collecting every scrap of data DDG has in real time and shares some of that data with other agencies on a regular basis.

It’s possible; however, they can’t be compelled to actively lie. We would expect DDG communications on privacy to cease if they were compromised by NSL.

Unless the national security letter also forces them to keep doing these communications. Pretty sure you can be forced to lie by such a letter.

Not sure if that extends to being in a court though. Or if they would have to plead the 5th in such cases.

You cannot. You can only be indirectly forced to stop issuing a warrant canary due to incompatibility with requirements not to report, in narrow cases (stricter standards than standard letters.) This would go hand in hand with a request anyway, so removing the canary would still serve its purpose and that’s what other search engines have done. But there has been absolutely nothing compelling active, creative lies like what DDG would be writing here if compromised.

Would they have to be lying? They could say with total truth that they haven't gotten any search warrants because a national security letter is not a search warrant of any kind. It's an administrative subpoena. Search warrants have to target something specific. They've got very little to do with a national security letter authorizing the state to take every last scrap of data in real time "Room 641A" style

Or, the police assume that everyone uses Google, so it doesn't every occur to them to ask DDG. It's not like the police are known for their tech-saviness.

Or they're thoroughly backdoored and warrants aren't necessary.

The unofficial consensus seems to be that "well DDG isn't as good as google, but it's worth it because of privacy."

I've been using DDG almost exclusively for software engineering work for roughly the last three years, and can't remember the last time I felt like resorting to "!g", because I can't remember resorting to Google ever actually solving my problem.

I don't at all discount the possibility that there's some extra value I'm just able to forego without noticing, but is this really a particularly unique experience for DDG users on HN?

> [I] can't remember the last time I felt like resorting to "!g", because I can't remember resorting to Google ever actually solving my problem.

I use DDG by default and it covers most of my searches, but I do have 2 main issues.

1. Maps and business information is way better with Google.

2. I usually work with Salesforce, which uses a lot of words from the 'traditional' developer ecosystem, but is an entirely separate world. Google "knows" that the method I'm looking for is in the Apex string class, not the Java one.

It's not enough to get me to switch but I find a lot of Salesforce related queries which give perfect results on Google, but overly generic ones on DDG. I suspect that's a common issue when you work in a more niche area where the personalization is more valuable.

I use them, because I want them to be better, but I definitely have to fail-over to google every day. I'll still use them, because someone has to compete, but they still aren't as good as google for my searches.

How will using them make them better if they don't store any of your searches/results ?

I find that some things do require a !g, but it's becoming increasingly rare in my daily life. It's often, as another commenter said, when researching something that uses terms from another, more popular thing that Google really shines. That said, I still use DDG for almost everything. :)

I bang !g all the time still. Wish I didn't feel compelled to. As a point of contrast: I'm not using DDG very often for work, more so personal use.

One thing I notice DDG lags behind google in is certain cases where I want the most timely information regarding something. A few examples:

I’m not a huge sports fan but knowing a bit about the latest games helps for small talk among acquaintances. On Google I can type “Texas A&M football” and I get the most recent score right on top. DDG doesn’t do this and I usually have to dig through a few links to find it.

Another example- there have been 4 house fires in my area in the last few weeks. It’s enough and close proximity enough that I wondered if arson is involved. I DDG house fires in my area and got mostly results from 2012. Google was not perfect here but much more current results were returned.

Now I could probably adjust my search query/criteria and get better results but it seems that in general Google knows when to return current results vs general information about some regardless of publish date.

That's a category of queries that leads me to use Google. If I'm looking up current events or something that changes a lot over time, Google seems to be much better at giving me what I want without me needing to tweak my query or add time range restrictions on the search.

Also for some reason error messages come up with better results on Google. DDG will make it look like no one has ever written anything about the error I'm running into, Google usually has something in its index to show me.

That's because the warrants all go to Bing, lol.

Are you saying that DuckDuckGo passes the client ip address to Bing?

I think the bigger point here is that it's impossible to know either way because DDG doesn't undergo independent verification of their privacy.

It's closed-source code from a privately-owned, for-profit corporation based in the U.S. We have no idea what information they share or don't share, other than the claims they make about themselves.

Perhaps not everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

"It uses various APIs of other websites to show quick results to queries and for traditional links it uses the help of its partners (mainly Bing) and its own crawler."

Or people look up "bad" stuff using that search engine (Bing is notorious for porn).

So the bangs (!) are super useful in DDG for handling the limitations it has. As others have mentioned Google still wins for super technical searches, but only just so. What we now see for Google results for any niche topics is an 'uncanny valley' of about half being valid results and the other half being regurgitated spam/phishing sites with domains that usually end in .it or .de.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't figure out how to do technical searches in google anymore.

If I put something like the name of an obscure powershell cmdlet in quotes, google ignores the quotes and then takes words in the cmdlet and searches for variations of them returning a mess of search results.

I've tried using plus signs and all sorts of other stuff that used to work, but these days it seemingly just gives me what it thinks I want, rather than what I asked for.

I have the same problem. I've read that this is because Google is no longer returning results from indexing the web, it's returning results that people usually click on when searching similar things. Which is why you can search exact titles of webpages or exact text in quotes and it will fail to return the page in question.

As a developer I agree with you. I try and use DDG for most of my every day stuff. However on complex coding issues I almost always find myself back on Google after a couple frustrating minutes on DDG. I feel like a lot of this has to do with what historical search data Google stores vs DDG.

I'm an Italo-German prince and just recently came into a huge fortune.

I just discovered `hn!` the other day lol

I use DDG as my default search engine and it works fine if what you're searching is in English and is easy to find. When I'm looking for an exact page and type stuff that I remember is there Google always seems to find it, while DDG sometimes misses what I want. Also, for programming terms that also may have other meaning (e.g., python referring to snakes or programming), Google seems to always get me what I want, while DDG may get royally confused.

Now, when it comes to non-English, the fact that Google knows what is my native language makes it 10000% better. I often type stuff in my native language and those words are the same in Spanish then DDG shows me a buch of stupid Spanish results, when what I really wanted was my native language.

In the end I always end up reflecting that allowing the search engine to learn stuff about you is indeed somewhat useful. Still, DDG is the default search, Google will only get the queries it handles better.

Edit: I guess DDG could try asking my browser about what language it's configured in and prioritize that over Spanish....

I use DDG for most things, and being totally honest, it's not quite as good as Google, but it's pretty acceptable. Occasionally I'll try the same search on Google, and sometimes it's better. Not always.

> it's not quite as good as Google

Two years ago, I would have agreed. But Google has gotten dramatically more spammy and full of ads recently. DDG has better results for me 70% of the time.

>and full of ads recently

Are there really people here that don't use uBlock Origin or a different adblocker? I can't remember the last time I have seen an ad on a screen.

Whenever I'm on a new machine I get a momentary glimpse of what an ungodly mess the Web is without adblockers. I'd love to know what percentage of web users employ an adblocker, I suppose as that number increases the remaining users can expect to see an increase in both the volume and visibility (and arguably obnoxiousness) of the ads.

This doesn't stop SEO promotion. However I can't say DDG hasn't occasionally ranked some submarine results higher.

I don’t. I don’t pirate software either^. They are not the same thing, but in both instances sometimes you will negatively impact the little guy’s bottom line. So I don’t do either.

Edit: to clarify. I don’t think any less of any one for doing whatever or me being better than any one.

^there are exceptions. I’m sure if I needed to use Photoshop for a day I’d do something akin to pirating. In this case I don’t think it’s a big deal with Adobe being worth $300B.

> negatively impact the little guy’s bottom line

We are talking about Google here. How is blocking ads from Google "impacting the little guys's bottom line"?

The posts were about blocking ads en mass. Not about blocking Google specifically. It would be incredibly rare for some one to get ublock or something similar and only block multi billion dollar companies.

It's the smaller ad networks and obscure sites that are more likely to have malware sneak into the ads, though, so it's safer to block everything.

Sure. I could have similar or different but nonetheless reasons for software and apps. Maybe somehow getting around a SaaS app. Or for other circumstances like finding random people on the web to split a substack or Stratchery subscription with (the latter happened on Twitter and people were not pleased).

The reason doesn’t change my point. The smaller person is hurt by any of these actions when done to their thing - ad blocking, piracy, workarounds, etc.

I don't use adblockers because I need to see the web as the 'users' see it. When I do use a blocker I always forget to turn it off to do troubleshooting. Eventually I left it off... I'll proxy or incognito or whatever when it need to.

How do you do that? I'm a huge DDG fan and am 99% degoogled, force myself to use DDG every couple of weeks but always end up back at Google, because from my experience it's just miles better. Don't want to hate on DDG though, since there is obviously a massive gap in resources between both projects.

Great thing about using DDG is you can have both.

In my experience DDG is fine for general information but Google is better for very specific information.

But DDG supports !Bang. So you can do "!g" in your search bar for you specific query and it uses Google. Or "!w" to go directly to wikipedia or "!a" to search Amazon.

There's over 10,000 of them https://duckduckgo.com/bang so it's great for whatever sites you frequently look for information on.

And can even do things like complex math equations with "!wa" (Wolfram Alpha).

Point being, using DuckDuckGo as your default search engine doesn't mean you are limited to its' results. Personally I get the best of a lot of worlds by using it.

Yeah the problem about the bangs is that whenever I force myself to use DDG again I will end up using the !sp bang exclusively after around a week and decide to switch back to Google a while after that, because typing !sp after every search defeats the initial idea why I inteded to use DDG in the first place. Until I hate myself for using Google again and switch back. It's an endless cycle I cannot escape :/

so you at least try with no bang first and find ddg search results unsatisfactory? if you default to !sp maybe it would be better to use use startpage as a search engine, is it worse in some way than duckduckgo (excluding obvious diff of bangs)

Yes for some reason I have never considered using startpage as my default search engine and instead went straight back to google. Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try next time I'm at this stage of the cycle again .... :)

Wow I had no idea about this! Actually going to make me switch back to DDG

They really should market this more, its one of the best features.

or use !sp and use google through a proxy

Personally, I had great results with Searx - a metasearch engine that aggregates results from different engines. It supports DDG bangs (!g uses Google search, !!g redirects to Google search) and language flags (:en uses English, :ru uses Russian, etc)

I used to use the !s bang to get Google results via Startpage, but I find myself doing it less and less.

I don't know the exact timeframe it changed, but I've really noticed the difference around the last few months or so. It feels like it's a lot more common for me to do a search in Google that I would expect to have good results and be genuinely surprised at how every page is total garbage.

I rarely, very rarely, need to use !g in DDG searches these days. I don’t even really think about Google any more if I can’t find something, I usually just try a bit harder with DDG. I’m a happy customer

I use it for everything, and I have no idea if it's as good as Google or not because I've never needed to find out - that's good enough for me.

If the results on DDG are not satisfactory, I prepend a !g and try again.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

You might want to prefer !sp to !g if you want Google results without compromising privacy. Startpage is just a privacy proxy for Google results.

Startpage was purchased by an advertising organization that apparently "specializes in targeted advertising":

https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...

Startpage started aggressively monetizing a few months ago. At least that's when I realized there are way more paid results (ads) than before. I've been mooching for years so I thought that's ok. Maybe the owner wants some return for their money and I can live with scrolling a few more paid results.

But they didn't stop there. I bailed as soon as they started requiring js no matter what. They actively deny access to the site without js enabled.

Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

You can also append!

Or put it somewhere in the middle of your query! :)

And occasionally, Google is worse!

Particularly when searching for information that our governments have been paid by corporations to keep us from finding. Google is massively censored.

Such a claim warrants some examples.

How do you present examples when all it takes is a narrative of "conspiracy theory" to dismiss them? We know both government and corporations are, remain, and will continue to remain corruptible. We know they've done bad things, we know they do bad things, we know they can continue to do bad things.

So to be clear you have no examples, or proof of any kind for this claim?

It's that there's a conspiracy, but if they provide an example, you will accuse them of believing there's a conspiracy, which would distract from the argument that there is a conspiracy.

don't you see, the lack of examples is proof I am correct!!!

The assertion "<x> is a wing nut conspiracy theorist" is itself a conversation-ender. Or at best, the opening to a never-ending version of Culture Wars, V304,045.

Over the weekend we had a very civilized discussion about tribal stupidity (prompted by the Dietrich Bonhoeffer essay), and the reason it didn't descend into CW is that no one provided any examples. The instant anyone gave an example, the particulars of that example would have taken over.

So I can appreciate the desire for citations, but you have to realize that if he'd provided any, everyone would have just argued about those.

> and the reason it didn't descend into CW is that no one provided any examples. The instant anyone gave an example, the particulars of that example would have taken over.

On the other hand it's easy to think you're pontificating wisely but you've become untethered from reality. Absolutely it's easy for broad discussions to get distracted by lawyering examples, but the GGP made a specific claim, so they invited the request for evidence.

Or citation, or any credible resource, really.

This reeks like Conspiracy Theory all through. And if it is legit, that is a pity, because most, or many people will dismiss it for "quacking like a Wacky Conspiracy Theory".

DDG has never worked for me, and I've tried. While I've been a happy Brave Search user since day 1. I'm not joking when I say it's the best search experience after Google, by a mile.

I'm with you at this point.

I used to be a ddg user exclusively. The only time I use google is when searching a location nearby. Ddg has gotten worse over the last year or two, unusable almost for anything that isn't current events. It is full of blog spam whenever I search anything.

I've been using gigablast here and there, it's good for obscure, completely organic search results, but that means it's results feel like search before google existed. Brave fills the gap for me, it feels like how google used to feel before all the cruft started getting added in.

Was very pleasantly surprise with brave search.

Just on the offchance anyone from ddg reads this - a while I and orhers requested a bang for search.marginalia.nu - a more old school web search and would love it if I could !mg search :)

Edit for hn link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764

I finally switched my default to DDG after Google introduced their mandatory nag permission box in Incognito windows. It wasn't worth using Google any more after that. I use Incognito often when generally searching the Internet to avoid having to care about cookie-based tracking. Dealing with the nag just wasn't worth it any more.

And with that horrid dark pattern that forces you, for entirely arbitrary reasons to scroll down to click accept. It's really upsetting to see google acting in such a user hostile way. It's too bad.

I used DDG on my phone for a few years and had the constant comparison to Google on my desktop. The results are not worse, they are just different. It is easier to find rare jewels and non-clickbaity content with DDG this is sometimes way more interesting than the heap of content farms found by google. You sometimes have to give DDG a bit more hints what topic you are searching for by adding search words like "programming" or "city". But thats it. For me it is totally usable. At first I was too lazy to change it, now I don't want to change it anymore.

Anyone else noticed that Google results are 90% spam and lead to malware gateways? The quality has drastically dropped recently. I don't even use Windows to search out of fear I'll get a virus.

I can't help but feel like anyone who is celebrating this is just going through a slightly modified thought process of https://xkcd.com/538/

The fact that the government has never requested anything probably just means they get it from somewhere else.

If there was actually a pedo-terror-arsonist on the loose using ddg to find information on their targets, I'm very confident that the government would still be able to figure out what they were searching for

That's probably what people want anyway. Targeted surveillance is much more acceptable than blanket surveillance.

Warrants follow requests to compel sharing of information known to exist.

So, DDG very well may have been served requests for available information on a given user or IP, its just that the information the company had was not enough for LEOs to request a warrant.

It's still impressive, but it would be interesting to know if LEOs continue to ask, (as in, "has anything changed on your end where now we can get this stuff?") or if LEOs know DDG is a dead end and are no longer even making information requests.

My biggest gripe with DDG is that the search results are visually not as appealing as $GOOG, and I've tried several times to use it but it causes a barely perceptible eye strain for me and always end up back at big G.

I find the ddg results page to have too much decoration/not just the raw links/information. Maybe el Goog has just completely conditioned my brain after years of use.

Anyone else have a similar experience?

The reason for me to use duckduckgo over google is because google decided to hobble their search results with ISP-mandated "Strict Safe Search" (or whatever google calls it).

Google's programming results became noticeably poorer after this change. I noticed most of the programmers around me have started using duckduckgo too.

Duckduckgo works. Google doesn't. I switched.

I find DDG good for queries where I know my answer will be one of the top 5 results for sure. If I am skeptical about my question I usually find G fetches better results. But DDG satisfies about 90% of my queries so pretty happy with it.

doesn't the usa have secret searches a company can't acknowledge?

then canaries came about and I can't remember if they were outlawed in the usa.

I assume everyone is watching. I'm very boring, though, but I still want some privacy.

"... canaries came about and I can't remember if they were outlawed in the usa ..."

Most canaries come and go. The first one[1] is still extant and is updated every Monday morning:

https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

[1] https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1387090538273206274

cheers. I read somewhere warrant canaries had been outlawed and I just qwanted, it was in my country, australia. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/australia_out...

we have some really scary laws. a spook is allowed to force an employee of a company to spy, collect data, install malware on their employer's computers and of course they can't talk about it to anyone.

I would be more interested in subpoenas for user information than "search warrants" which I'm sure most companies have near zero since 2008 unless they have cartel tiea or whatever

I use StartPage over DDG. The results are just way better. Likely because StartPage anonymously using google index.

However, for programming related questions I couldn't live without google.

I've used ddg since about 2010. Recently I moved to Brave search when that came out. Now I'm enjoying Neeva, has anyone tried that one?

too bad the results are not that good. when using duckduckgo you have to be very specific or you just get unrelated crud

Do you have recent real examples? 98% of the time for me both DDG and Google pull up the same Wikipedia article or Stack Overflow answer or Github repo or news story. Occasionally I still do "!g" or "!gi" in DDG to see what Google has but less and less.

I just tried to plug in my most recent search from Google: UnsafeVarint, where I was looking for the protobuf method. Google gets me a direct hit to the source code. Perhaps "unfair" because Google knows this result is relevant to that search for me.

I put the same search into DDG and it gives me two mainsteam media articles about COVID as #1 and #2. Useless. People who defend Bing are just out of their minds.

Imagine defending a search engine by microsoft that top-ranks irrelevant articles from its own wholly-owned subsidiary, MSN. Just absolutely the worst search results anyone can imagine.

I just tried "UnsafeVarint" in DDG and while #1 and #2 were useless COVID hits as you said, DDG #4 was the same as Google's #1 hit which was this GitHub issue:

https://github.com/tensorflow/models/issues/7420

Google's #2 hit for me was blogspam at "bankoftrans [dot] com" that copied the source code for UnsafeVarint in order to game Google search results. (A growing problem others in this discussion have been complaining about.)

So Google isn't stellar for your search, either, though perhaps it was working better for you because you were logged in with your Google Account.

Like I said, I do still use Google via "!g" and "!gi" when DDG's results are garbage, but often in these cases Google's results are also junk.

"I put the same search into DDG and it gives me two mainsteam media articles about COVID as #1 and #2. Useless. People who defend Bing are just out of their minds."

Exactly what search query did you use? I just popped "UnsafeVarint" (without quotes) into DDG and it's not remotely "media articles about COVID".

I don't know whether it'll be what you want. It's clearly a long-tail result in DDG as well, but it's at least mostly programming stuff for me, and no COVID at all.

Interesting, because for me, the first result was the link to the source code.

Does it work better for you if you surround the query in quotes?

> ...

EDIT: You are right, double quotes around "UnsafeVarint" improve the result. Learned something new just now. : )

My first result was something in another language but my second result was the GitHub link for a file in protobuf.

My issue with ddg is the speed vs google. There is a delay with ddg and that alone pushes me back to google.

How does DDG make money?

Selling adverts that target the search keywords.

Is this a fact or a theory

As one of the sellers of those adverts, I'd go for fact :)

I used DDG for 2 years. Recently, I've been testing brave search, which I personally think is much better.

They're investing in their own index, whereas DDG is just Bing, but without tracking.

You don't count Amazon affiliate linking as tracking?

And you should believe them because they said so.

Ha, well tinfoil hat on... Maybe they have not had to process any search warrants, because the various three-letter agencies know to just ask nicely and they'll hand it over.

The conspiracy theorist in me says they get got a court order to make the press release along with a warrant for some information...

how about searx

This. Searx with Google engine, has been perfect. I host Searx on my VPS. My search is proxied via searx to google anonymously. I didn’t miss google even one bit, since the results are just same.

I understand what they’re trying to say, but…this would also be true if they were just irrelevant.

It would also be true if they were a ham sandwich, but since we know they're not one, we ignore that possibility.

This reminded me of:

> If grandma had wheels she’d be a bicycle

I thought of being sarcastic, but you've done it for me.

My version of that saying is "If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bus" but this is fine, too.

Has anyone outside of the "I'm deeply concerned about online privacy" brigade even heard of DuckDuckGo?

I have the same concern. As long as they're shipped as a search option for every major browser, even on mobile, I have hope.

The only alternative search that doesn't suck currently is Brave - they're the only US-based search engine that has its own index. Everybody else is using Google or Bing which exposes you to algorithmic manipulation and censorship, if not outright tracking. Curiously, though, it shows the same biases in image search as Google: "straight couple" brings up gay couples, and other well known "litmus test" searches are similar as well. In fact almost the same selection of images as Google image search.

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